1,721,532 research outputs found
Towards a fairer gig economy
Get PDF‘Towards a Fairer Gig Economy’ is a small collection of articles examining the social and economic problems associated with the ‘gig economy’. The gig economy includes a wide range of labour carried out by workers providing services as couriers, taxi drivers, online freelancers and more. Issues examined include an over-supply of labour, falling wages, long hours and poor working conditions. Each article makes suggestions for how these problems can be addressed and how a fairer gig economy can be built: including through regulation, collective bargaining and wider policy recommendations. The collection’s contributors include cycle couriers, union organisers, academics and researchers
Home-working, power and the governance of BT : the techniques and practices of corporate change
No full textEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Fact factories: Wikipedia and the power to represent
Get PDFWikipedia is no longer just another source of knowledge about the world. It is fast becoming a central source, used by other powerful knowledge brokers like Google and Bing to offer authoritative answers to search queries about people, places and things and as information infrastructure for a growing number of Web applications and services. Researchers have found that Wikipedia offers a skewed representation of the world that favours some groups at the expense of others so that representations on the platform have repercussions for the subjects of those representations beyond Wikipedia's domain. It becomes critical in this context to understand how exactly Wikipedia's representations come about, what practices give rise to them and what socio-technical arrangements lead to their expression. This ethnographic study of Wikipedia explores the values, principles and practices that guide what knowledge Wikipedia represents. It follows the foundational principles of Wikipedia in its identity both as an encyclopaedia and a product of the free and open source software and internet freedom rhetoric of the early 2000s. Two case studies are analysed against the backdrop of this ideology, illustrating how different sets of actors battle to extend or reject the boundaries of Wikipedia, and in doing so, affect who are defined as the experts, subjects and revolutionaries of the knowledge that is taken up. The findings of this thesis indicate that Wikipedia's process of decision-making is neither hierarchical nor is it egalitarian; rather, the power to represent on Wikipedia is rhizoid: it happens at the edges rather than in the centre of the network. Instead of everyone having the same power to represent their views on Wikipedia, those who understand how to perform and speak according to Wikipedia's complex technical, symbolic and policy vocabulary tend to prevail over those who possess disciplinary knowledge about the subject being represented. Wikipedians are no amateurs as many would have us believe; nor are they passive collectors of knowledge held in sources; Wikipedians are, instead, active co-creators of knowledge in the form of facts that they support using specially chosen sources. The authority of Wikipedia and Wikipedians is garnered through the performative acts of citation, through the ability of individual editors to construct the traces that represent citation, and through the stabilization and destabilization of facts according to the ideological viewpoints of its editors. In venerating and selecting certain sources among others, Wikipedians also serve to reaffirm traditional centres of authority, while at the same time amplifying new centres of knowledge and denying the authority of knowledge that is not codified in practice. As a result, Wikipedia is becoming the site of new centres of expertise and authoritative knowledge creation, and is signalling a move towards the professionalization of the expertise required to produce factual data in the context of digital networks
Supplemental_Material – Supplemental material for A review of available software for adaptive clinical trial design
No full textSupplemental material, Supplemental_Material for A review of available software for adaptive clinical trial design by Michael John Grayling and Graham Mark Wheeler in Clinical Trials</p
Internet geographies: data shadows and digital divisions of labor
Get PDFFrom the earliest stages of computer-mediated communication, technical change was predicted to undermine the significance of geography and lead to the “death of distance.” This seemed a logical consequence of electronic media enabling people to communicate from anywhere, to anyone, and anytime. However, empirical research, such as that illustrated in this chapter, has challenged this view. The authors argue that the Internet augments everyday places. As such, much like material geographies, the Internet can be spatially mapped. In doing so, the authors uncover significant geographic inequalities that shape how we use, move through, and interact with the world
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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